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I have a little bargain I’m making with myself. If I can find at least five books in each of the categories of Guardian’s 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read Before They Die list…then I will let myself join Biblio File’s challenge. The books should really fall into at least two of these four categories a) books already on the tbr pile that I own b) books that I’ve been meaning to read, but are at the library c) books already on my Amazon wishlist d) books that would work well with other challenges (aka books I’ve already listed on other challenge lists.)
Comedy
The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett (b, d)
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (a, d)
Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding (a)
Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding (a, d)
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (a, d)
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (a)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon (a, d)
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (b, d)
Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope (a, d)

Science Fiction and Fantasy
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (b)
Kindred by Octavia Butler (b)
Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll (a,d)
Dune by Frank L Herbert (a,d)
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (b)
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (a)
The Monk by Matthew Lewis (a,d)
Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin (c)
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (b)
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (a)
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain (a)
The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (c)
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin (a, d)

State of the Nation
Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (b,c)
Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe (a, d)
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (a)
Middlemarch by George Eliot (a, d)
Silas Marner by George Eliot (a, d)
The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (a)
Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell (a, d)
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell (a, d)
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (a)
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (b,d)
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (a)
The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope (a, d)

War and Travel
She: A History of Adventure by H Rider Haggard (c)
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (b)
Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally (a)
The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy (a)
Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott (a)
Maus by Art Spiegelman (b)
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (a, d)
Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne (b)

Okay, so I don’t quite meet two on all the books listed. And some of the books listed I have no interest in reading. If they’ve been on the shelf unread this long, then it’s not like I’m all that eager to read them now. But I think I can get ten books total from all these books.

Comedy:
Crime:
Family and Self:
Love:
Science Fiction and Fantasy:
State of the Nation:
War and Travel: